No one every thinks about how we got here. About what our ancestors had to go through and how the chances that we would actually ne here get slimmer and slimmer the more that you think about it. All those people that are in your family tree have helped to shape who you are and the person that you will become. Our family seems to determine who we are going to be in life and always seems to find a way to get us there. In the story A Wagner Matinee there is a man, Clark, who lives in Boston who receives word from his Aunt Georgiana who is coming to visit from Nebraska to settle an estate. When his aunt, Georgiana, had been younger she had been a very talented music teacher and she had been the one you introduced him to Shakespeare, the music that she played on her small parlor organ, and classic mythology. When she left she had to give up music and that is one thing that she despised. “It never really dies, then the soul? It withers to the outward eye only.” Georgiana then met a man and they proceeded to move out to Nebraska and he lost contact with her. One day he received word that she was coming back and Clark decided to take her out to a concert because she had not been around music in so long and she forgot how much she loved music. In the story A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather, you realize the hardship that a lot of people went though while on the frontier and then how people in Boston lived a more promising life.
The place you grow up will always effect how you think about the rest of the world and this seems to happen to the main character, Clark, in Willa Cather’s story A Wagner Matinee. Clark explains Nebraska as a dark memory that had a monotony landscape. “The world there is the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that stretched to sunset; between, the sordid conquests of peace, more merciless than those of war.” He never seems to mention anything bright. In your mind all you can think about are harsh, dark colors that make you realize how life in Nebraska at least was not the same as it was in Boston.
In conclusion, the story describes that life changes, and nothing stays the same throughout it. It is in the hands of the people to decide that how they want their life to be. They can make it as beautiful as they want to and they can also make it worse than it has ever been
Have you ever loved a place as a child, but as you got older you realized how sugar coated it really was? Well, that is how Jacqueline Woodson felt about her mother’s hometown and where she went every summer for vacation. The story, When A Southern Town Broke A Heart, starts off with the author feeling as if Greenville is her home. But one year when she has 9 she saw it as the racist place it really is. This causes her to feel betrayed, but also as if she isn't the naive little girl she once was. By observing this change, you can conclude that the theme she is trying to convey is that as you get older, you also get wiser.
In Part II of A Sand County Almanac, titled "The Quality of Landscape," Leopold takes his reader away from the farm; first into the surrounding Wisconsin countryside and then even farther, on an Illinois bus ride, a visit to the Iowa of his boyhood...
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Patricia Nelson Limerick describes the frontier as being a place of where racial tension predominately exists. In her essay, “The Frontier as a Place of Ethnic and Religion Conflict,” Limerick says that the frontier wasn’t the place where everyone got to escape from their problems from previous locations before; instead she suggested that it was the place in which we all met. The frontier gave many the opportunities to find a better life from all over the world. But because this chance for a new life attracted millions of people from different countries across the seas, the United States experienced an influx of immigrants. Since the east was already preoccupied by settlers, the west was available to new settlement and that was where many people went. Once in the western frontier, it was no longer just about blacks and whites. Racial tension rose and many different races and ethnic groups soon experienced discrimination and violence based on their race, and beliefs instead of a since of freedom at the western frontier.
“Nebraska” uses a persona that is best described as classic “American”, which describes the voice as being a young Midwestern male that typically seems detached and rebellious. In the second stanza of “Nebraska,” the author clarifies the persona used by writing, “From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off ...
The Nebraskan prairies are beautiful and picturesque and set the scene for a memorable story. Big farm houses and windmills placed throughout the graceful flowing golden yellow grass become a nostalgic aspect of Jim as he leaves his childhood life behind. The frontier includes destructive and depressing winters and luscious summers that affect Jim's family and the immigrants. The gloominess of winter and the suicide of Mr. Shimerda provide memories that associate Jim's recollections with nature's seasons. The Christmas season provided faith to persevere through winter and the exchanging of gifts made happy memories, which Jim could not experience if snow darkness did not exist. The summers were most unforgettable though. The smoldering sun and fertile land made growing crops easy. The immigrants references of roads lined with sunflowers as opportunity inspired Jim to appreciate the splendor and bountifulness of the land. Later Jim encounters these pathways, now concealed because of erosion, remembering that "this was the road over which Antonia and I came when we got off the train . . . the feelings of that night had been so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. For Antonia and me, this had been the road of Destiny" (Cather237).
Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett follows social worker Dan Cohen on his mission to bring music into the lives of nursing home residents. Cohen’s non-profit organization Music & Memory hope to use music to help patients struggling with memory loss regain their self identify. Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory introduces us to people suffering from memory disorders and have been confined to nursing homes. Their memory impairment and separation from the outside world have left them isolated.
The story has two main threads. The first is the true story of Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman's experiences as a young Jewish man during the horrors leading up to and including his confinement in Auschwitz. The second intertwining story is about Vladek as an old man, recounting his history to his son Art, the author of the book, and the complicated relationship between the two of them. It's a difficult process for both father and son, as Vladek tries to make sense of his twighlight years, indelibly marked by his experiences and a slave to the processes he had to resort to in order to make it through. On this level, it's also about Art, as he comes to terms with what his father went through, while still finding the more irritating aspects of his father's personality difficult to live with.
Throughout the first paragraph, the author gives explicit details that lead to astonishing imagery. Whether he talks of the “high wheat plains of western Kansas” or the “hard blue skies” this paints a picture of what this small town looks like while also giving descriptive characteristics
“I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study.” (Wagner, 654) When the United States is mentioned, there are a few places that immediately come to mind, places like Florida, Nevada, New York and California. There are a lot of places in the middle that often times tend to get left out, though the truth is that these places are the most important. Places like Nebraska and Wyoming are crucial pieces of the nation. Though these places are not necessarily the most popular, they are perhaps the most important. These states are like the common workers of the world, taking on tasks that no one else was willing to. These states are some of the most crucial pieces of the United States simply because they are full of people willing to do the work that all of the other far more glamorous states are not. This is something expertly depicted within Willa Cather’s text A Wagner Matinee, where Cather perfectly depicts just how much internal strength it takes to lead one of these lives. A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather shows the everyday struggle of individuals living all over the Midwestern area of the United States.
Part of the makeup of a New England landscape is the cruel and bitter winters. The engineer establishes the mood of the scenery early on when he mentions the “deadness of the community” (Wharton). Wharton builds on this throughout the book, constantly keeping the image of a cold, snow-covered landscape in the reader’s mind. Even on the nicer winter days, with the snow glistening from
Opera originated in Italy in the early 1500’s. It gained popularity in the Baroque period when people began experimenting new and different sounds with their voices. Opera is very dramatic work and you must have a really great voice to be considered as an Opera singer. Operas are usually performed in Opera houses and are accompanied by different instruments/ orchestra. It started off in Italy and soon became used all over the world. In the 1800s, Italian Opera soon began to take over all of Europe. The most known Opera singer is Mozart, who is most known for the comic operas. The soprano voice is the voice typically used as the choice for the female of the opera since the 18th century. Earlier, it was common for parts to be sung by any female soprano voice.The tenor voice, from the Classical era, has been assigned the role of male.
In Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, the setting of old time Nebraska impact the way the characters act and their. The setting impacts each person in a different way, Jim, for example, Nebraska never leaves him, even after living two decades in New York. The characters in My Antonia have a strong response to their environments, the landscape becomes
The descriptions in the story foreshadow the tragedy that ends the story. The author believed unexpected things happen often. In the case of this story, Louise Mallard believed her husband to be dead, having been told this by her sister, Josephine. However, when it is revealed that her husband had been alive the whole time, she is unhappy to see him and suffers a fatal heart attack. While she did have heart trouble, Richards and Josephine thought that the news of her husband’s death, not her seeing him again would be detrimental to her health, possibly even fatal. Chopin succeeded in getting this message across.